Image by DigitalMuses
So, the new paradigm for war is: if you can see it, you can kill it.
And drones all over the battlefield mean you can see it.
This has lead to a strategy of dispersal. Until the artillery, air and attack drones are neutralized troops need to avoid massing, because masses get taken out fast. The use of motorcycle infantry is one example of this: move fast, stay dispersed, and swarm.
This has particularly been the case in the Ukrainian war, but it’s also made Hezbollah’s guerilla tactics less effective and forced them to use their tunnels far more.
But forget all that. What happens in war, comes home. Combined with modern surveillance tech, by which I mean various recognition systems, including facial, gait, body and IR, not to mention the tracking devices known as phones everyone insists on carrying, this means that governments which are willing to invest in the necessary hardware and software (AI seems to be good for this), can easily track individuals.
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And once they’ve tracked you, they don’t need to send cops: they can just send drones.
What I expect, and not too far in the future, is for this paradigm to spread to domestic law enforcement. Lots of drones keeping an eye on everything, and drones being used to take out whomever they want. I’d also expect ground drones to be used far more for crowd control and suppression.
The great thing, if you weren’t a government, about pre-internet/cell-phone tech combined with huge cities was genuine anonymity most of the time. People could fade in the masses, and if they were able to break contact with internal security forces (that’s what cops are), you stood a good chance of not being identified, and even if identified, finding you wasn’t easy.
That era has been passing for some time: the ubiquitous security cameras, often with listening devices attached were the first step.
But what’s coming down the line is going to allow for some truly dystopian levels of control and scary levels of individual targeting.
And remember, drones can be very cheap.
We’ll talk a little about the weaknesses of current internal security regimes, and how to stay ahead. But for now, to start, if you’re doing something the government doesn’t like (perhaps demonstrating against a certain genocide) don’t carry a phone, even one that’s “turned off” and wear a mask. If you need to break contact, get inside a building and merge with a crowd, then find some simple way to change your clothing profile and ideally your IR profile.
Don’t, at least, make it easy for them.
mago
Been a long time since I’ve lived urban, although I did on both coasts of the states and in Northern Europe, intensely.
Public and private surveillance weren’t even a mirage at that time and in those places.
I’ve been living remote in one place or another for twenty eight years and counting now. For what it’s worth.
I communicate and receive messages and information daily on this iPhone, so doesn’t matter if I’m sitting off trail in an aspen grove on some high mountainside, it’s all recorded.
To quote Bob Dylan: to live outside the law you must be honest. Yeah, well, that was a long time ago in days gone by.
Still, as the saying goes: honesty is the best policy.
Won’t buy you a cappuccino, but it might buy you more time. . .
Purple Library Guy
Drones all over the battlefield don’t necessarily mean you “can see it”.
I’ve noticed in the Russia/Ukraine war that fighting goes quite differently in forests, for instance. In the more bare areas, towns and even little clusters of farms make foci for the action precisely because they have a few buildings to hide some troops in–this is not perfect even against drones, and if the Russians decide a point is worth dropping a big aerial bomb on, just forget it. But they’re definitely better than nothing. Similarly, the terrain often has these little lines of trees, and the Russians often take terrain tree-line by tree-line because you can sort-of hide a few advancing soldiers in them.
bruce wilder
Dispersal is a tactic, not a strategy.
Strategy would be planning for tactical advantage or a favorable peace.
I am not entirely sure what could be identified as a new strategic paradigm. Maybe inverse propaganda: letting people know nothing for certain but believe any narrative they like.
Oakchair
Our current society looks like societies described in old dystopian novels.
We started off funding and/or creating Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Saddam then they were evil and we were always at war with them.
A TV in every house that is always on.
Surveillance equipment everywhere.
Everyone has their daily 2+ minutes of hate which is called the news or scrolling the media feed.
The chocolate ration has been increased from 8 ounce to 6, or in todays parlance food inflation was 1% last year.
Censorship is widespread.
War is peace. Our government goes around waging war because if we don’t “we’ll have to fight them over here” Bombing hospitals and starving children is “defense”
Ignorance is strength. Covid made this clear as day with the media telling us none stop that doing our own research would make us stupid conspiracy theorists.
To be happy forget about changing society just take your daily dose of Soma, Opioids, SSRI, benzo’s etc.
It would be shorter to list the ways our society is not the same as a fascist dystopia. Actually what trait of a fascist dystopia is not present?
Dan Lynch
Ian said drones can be very cheap.
True, and so resistance groups and even individual extremists will have drones, too. It’s just a question of time until a Western pol is taken out by a drone.
SRL
The 2nd Amendment fanatics are living in the wrong century. The right to operate drones is eclipsing the right to bear arms. Those sort often seem to think wearing masks is something the security forces want so we lose all individuality. Would Jan 6th been so easy to prosecute if they were wearing mask? What chumps!
bruce wilder
Devastation of the built environment is common in Ukraine and Gaza. Annihilation of the population a distinctive aspect of Gaza, if only because both sides accept refugees and POWs in Ukraine, while Israel’s policy is murder and starvation.
I suppose we should keep an eye on Maui and Western North Carolina and Florida, to see how emergency services and state-sponsored recovery from natural disasters progresses. The narratives from electoral partisans obscures what FEMA is doing or failing to do in line with the general policy of “no common facts” that might inform anyone.
Ian Welsh
Bruce: point taken on tactics vs. strategy.
Dan. Yes. I wrote an article called “the age of assassination” about that side of drones.
shagggz
@bruce wilder,
Rather than a new strategic paradigm, isn’t inverse propaganda basically just the familiar “flood[ing] the zone with shit”?
Jan Wiklund
I think you think far too little about these in between – those are not rally proles, but not really elites either. In the end, it is their behaviour that decides if the elites are toppled or not.
And just keeping anonymous isn’t a very good strategy to severe the links of the in-betweens to the elites. The anonymous are too easy to blot out and make people forget about.
I am not sure about what is the good strategy, but the more brittle those links are, the better. And the more one could get these in-betweens to se their interests to be bound up with the majority, also the better.
It shouldn’t be a utopia, after all that was what happened during most of the 20th century.
And, after all, the behaviour of the elites is in the interests of very few. See for example https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2219853.
somecomputerguy
People have been predicting the end of insurgency, however defined, based on the availability of advanced surveillance techniques for at least 40 years. Back then it was ground surveillance radar.
Warnings about this stuff are well taken. But despair is emphatically not warranted. Mostly it just means working harder. No system invented and operated by humans to oppress humans is invincible. The people who invent them are broken. There is always a hack or a work-around or counter-measure.
One of the primary counter-measures is always other people. Including those you are opposing. Real people have to use these systems, and people are fuckups. No oppressor wants to give guns to people who are smarter or more charismatic than they are. One thing lackeys like to do is not pay people, and keep the money for themselves. Remember; the most lavishly equipped force in history, which no doubt, had access to all of this stuff and more, just finished a 20-year military contest with cavemen by getting it’s ass kicked.
Back in the day, among other things, it turned out that ground surveillance radar didn’t like getting wet. It was also easily spoofed. The primary source on technical capabilities is almost always people trying to sell it, not people using using it.
What is the effective difference between using ‘radar, and bulldozing all the trees in a 300 yard radius? Which should be better? In Vietnam they used the bulldozers, and still got attacked.
Bazarov
I think this post is somewhat biased by the recent mode of war: attrition, which is less a result of technological change and more a result of politics. These, after all, are limited wars we’re talking about.
In a war of attrition where operations focus on grinding down the enemy while preserving and expanding your own forces, it makes sense to spread out along a broad front and invite your enemy to attack. For most of the war, it’s pretty boring stuff–the front line is static, the fighting at a constant low level all the way across it, with sorties here and there that force your opponent to commit reserves so that they can be attritted.
The Russians decided to pursue this strategy in Ukraine at the political level. I think they did so because:
1.) They did not want to see so many of their soldiers killed, as would be the case if they concentrated their forces and stormed the country (I believe the Russians do have this capability, but it would mean calling up another million+ soldiers and tolerating another 100,000+ dead).
2.) The slow-burn would make for fewer dramatic moments that might result in a trigger-happy overreaction from NATO.
3.) The slow-burn would allow time for Ukraine/NATO to “unmask” itself and turn world opinion against them while increasing sympathy for Russia.
4.) The slow-burn in effect keeps the war–rightly seen in Russia as a fight against NATO, not Ukraine–confined so that Russia can prepare its economy and citizenry for a wider conflict.
In the event the conflict escalates catastrophically–as in no longer being “a special military operation” but rather doctrinal “war” as Russia defines it–then I believe there will be significant concentration of forces on the battlefield, resulting in WWII-like massive battles.
This will be a total war among the big boys. The casualties will be enormous. It would almost certainly result in a resounding Russian victory in the European theater, which would in turn invite nuclear escalation.
So, in my view, it’s not drones and artillery that’s keeping Russia’s army dispersed, it’s the mode of attritional war itself and the political directive to contain the war that determines its shape.